The Four Friends: Sickness as Transformation
Four men pledge friendship on the body's death: 'who can take nothingness as head, life as spine, death as rump?' Then sickness comes — and they hold it, mock it, and use it: arm for rooster, rump for wheels, dying as rest.
The story
Zi Si, Zi Yu, Zi Li, and Zi Lai spoke together, saying: “Who can take nothingness as head, life as spine, death as rump? Whoever knows death and life, survival and ruin, as one body — we will be his friend.” The four looked at one another, laughed, and met in the heart without opposition — and so became friends.
Soon Zi Yu fell ill. Zi Si went to see him. “Great!” said Zi Yu. “The maker of things is making me into this crumpled thing!” — his back bent like a hook, his five organs on top, his chin in his navel, his shoulders above his crown, his hump pointing at the sky, his yin-yang breath in disorder. His heart idle and unoccupied, he hopped to the well and saw his reflection: “Alas! The maker of things is making me into this crumpled thing!”
“Do you hate it?” asked Zi Si.
“Hate it? No! What should I hate? If, in time, he transforms my left arm into a rooster, I will use it to call the dawn. If he transforms my right arm into a pellet, I will use it to shoot an owl for roasting. If he transforms my rump into wheels and my spirit into a horse, I will mount it — what need for another carriage? What I got, I got in its season; what I lose, I lose in the order of things. Rest in the season and dwell in what follows — sorrow and joy cannot get in. The ancients called this release from the hanging. And those who cannot release themselves — things are knotted in them. Things have never been able to overcome Heaven. What should I hate?”
Soon Zi Lai fell ill — panting, near death, wife and children ringed around him weeping. Zi Li went to see him. “Out of the way! Don’t disturb the transformation!” he scolded them. Leaning on the door, he said: “Great is the maker! What will he make of you now? Where will he send you? Will he make you into a mouse’s liver? Will he make you into an insect’s arm?”
Zi Lai said: “When a father and mother tell a child to go east, west, south, or north, it obeys. Yin and yang to a person are more than father and mother. They are bringing me near death, and if I do not listen, I am the stubborn one — what fault is theirs? The great clod loads me with form, labors me with life, eases me with age, rests me with death. So what makes my life good is what makes my death good.
“Now, when a great smith casts metal, and the metal leaps up and says, ‘I must be made into a Mo Ye sword!’ the smith will surely think it unlucky metal. Now that I have once taken on a human form, to keep saying ‘human! human!’ — the maker will surely think me an unlucky person. Once I take heaven and earth for the great furnace and the maker for the great smith, where could I go and not be all right?”
He fell asleep content, woke with a start — and a sudden sweat broke out.
Framing: the chapter’s four-person answer to the body
- The friendship is founded on the death-sentence. Their pledge — 以无为首，以生为脊，以死为尻, nothingness as head, life as spine, death as rump — is the exact anti-phrasing of the funeral culture the Qin Shi passage diagnoses: here the body is claimed in advance as a sequence of transformations, and 相视而笑，莫逆于心 (“looked at one another, laughed, met in the heart without opposition”) — the source of the idiom 莫逆之交, “friends who never oppose” — is what friendship looks like when death is already agreed to.
- Zi Yu’s game: the transformed arm gets a use. Rooster — call the dawn; pellet — roast an owl; rump — wheels, spirit — horse. The joke is precise: nothing is downgraded, everything is commissioned. The passage is the site’s counter-example to the well-frog’s limits and the mantis’s overreach: the four friends’ freedom is not from the body but for whatever the body becomes — the same 得者时也，失者顺也 formula the Qin Shi story speaks over a death, here spoken over a sickness, with 县解 (release from the hanging) as the shared name.
- Zi Lai’s dying: the great smith and the unlucky metal. 大块载我以形，劳我以生，佚我以老，息我以死 — the great clod’s four verbs: loads, labors, eases, rests — death is the rest the same agent gives, so “what makes my life good is what makes my death good” (善吾生者，乃所以善吾死也). And the great-smith parable is the chapter’s own joke at the expense of the self that insists on its form: metal that demands to be a famous sword is unlucky metal (不祥之金); the form that demands to remain “human! human!” is the unlucky person. The passage’s last image — 成然寐，蘧然觉: fell asleep content, woke with a start, sweat breaking out — is death written as waking, the same reversal the drumming basin page documents.
- The three registers, kept apart. The fable’s power is its comedy; the site does not read it as a prescription for illness (the tradition’s own protocol page never instructs anyone to refuse care) — it records the text’s argument that the terror of sickness is itself a sickness of measure, and notes that the passage’s 安时处顺 formula is the book’s own, shared verbatim with ch. 3.
Why it belongs in this knowledge base
Because it is the inner chapters’ fullest statement of the transformation-view, and the natural companion of Qin Shi’s three cries: one passage for the death of the founder, one for the deaths of friends — the book’s two funerals, both measured.
Uncertainty preserved: an inner chapter passage (earliest stratum), fully verified against the Wikisource full text; the four friends are fable; the passage is quoted in translation as evidence, with the source-text discipline the translation policy requires.
The odd-person notion behind this story has its own Jiren (畸人) entry.
Sources
- Zhuangzi ch. 6 (Dazongshi, inner chapter), the four-friends passage: Zi Si, Zi Yu, Zi Li, Zi Lai. Verified against the Wikisource full text of the chapter, which is quoted directly below in translation